Topics in this report
1. Upcoming School Contact
2. Students in India Experience Successful Contact
3. ARISS Distributes Calendars
4. Article on ARISS Contact with Challenger Learning Center
5. Technopolis Contact Video Posted

1. Upcoming School Contact
Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario in Ottawa, Canada has been scheduled for an Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS) contact on Tuesday, January 20 at 18:01 UTC via telebridge station ON4ISS in Belgium. A space club has been formed at the hospital and those children participating in the club have learned about the ISS via videos, the internet and guest speakers. They have learned to use correct radio protocol and have tracked and plotted the course of the ISS. They have also created artwork to be displayed during the contact. Media coverage of the event is expected.

Today I was checking out the New York City's metropolitan area repeater frequencies when I noticed that a few D-STAR repeaters are already active. Since I never really spent a single minute to find out what this new mode was all about I decided it was time to learn something new and eventually buy a new D-STAR radio. According to Wikipedia, D-STAR is "a digital voice and data protocol specification developed as the result of research by the Japan Amateur Radio League to investigate digital technologies for amateur radio. While there are other digital on-air technologies being used by amateurs that have come from other services, D-Star is one of the first on-air standards to be widely deployed and sold by a major radio manufacturer that is designed specifically for amateur service use" It looked interesting already but when I found that Miles Mann WF1F is proposing the adoption of the D-STAR based ICOM ID800 onboard the ISS I was almost convinced that it was time for me to buy one of these. Unfortunately, my enthusiasm cooled down when I read about some of the criticism that is raising around it.

The International Space Station's Expedition 18 crew Thursday focused its attention on hardware installation, maintenance and science experiments.

Flight Engineer Sandra Magnus began work to set up and outfit the second of two new crew sleep stations in the Harmony module. The sleep stations are part of preparations for a six-person crew.

Commander Mike Fincke worked to outfit the Combustion Integrated Rack (CIR) in the Destiny laboratory. The CIR will house hardware to do further research on combustion in microgravity.

Flight Engineer Yury Lonchakov did routine maintenance on the toilet in the Zvezda service module and transferred water from the docked Progress resupply craft to storage tanks.

An International Space Station Expedition 18 ARISS school contact has been planned with participants at Aaxam Jatiya Vidyalaya, Guwahati, India on 07 January. The event is scheduled to begin at approximately 0801 UTC.

The contact will be a telebridge between stations NA1SS and W6SRJ. The contact should be audible over western North America. Interested parties are invited to listen in on the 145.80 MHz downlink. Audio from the contact should also be available via the AMSAT conference on EchoLink and via the 9010 Discovery reflector on IRLP. The participants are expected to conduct the conversation in English.

Topics in this report:
1. Upcoming School Contacts
2. Technopolis Contact Successful
3. ARISS 25th Anniversary Special Event Update

1. Upcoming School Contacts
Axam Jatiya Vidyalaya in Guwahati, India has been scheduled for an Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS) contact on Wednesday, January 7 at 08:01 UTC via telebridge station W6SRJ in California. Approximately 1300 students are enrolled at the school. All students are taught in Assamese with English taught as a compulsory second language.

Tongfu Road No. 1 Primary School in Guangzhou, Guangdong, P.R. China has been scheduled for an Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS) contact on Saturday, January 17 at 10:23 UTC. The school is over 70 years old with an enrollment of over 1000 students. An amateur radio club was established at the school in 2007 and during the same year a team from this school won the national youngster's amateur radio contest. Elective courses on amateur radio, space technology and ARISS are offered to the students. All grades have participated in essay and cartoon contests to prepare for the contact. Students have written letters to the astronauts and determined the questions to ask. Media coverage is planned with newspapers, television and the internet.

Hi Everyone . im in the uniteded kingdom & i have just managed to recieve a braodcast on my childrens hand held wakie talkies from mike fincke on the iss CALL SIGN na1ss i was so shocked... I didn't even know that they where poeple aboard the ISS. I can only assume it was a repeater message as the range on the hand held walkie talkie is only 5miles .. but it did sound like he was talking to me he seemed to ask me for my call sign .The chat Kinda lasted 5mins then they faded away . Can any body explain this for me ? many thanks & happy christmas to all
Mark.
Hull.
England

The seven astronauts killed during the 2003 loss of NASA's space shuttle Columbia survived less than a minute after their spacecraft began breaking apart, according to a new report released Tuesday that suggests changes to astronaut training and spacecraft cabin design.

The 400-page "Columbia Crew Survival Investigation Report" released today states that Columbia's ill-fated crew had a period of just 40 seconds between the loss of control of their spacecraft and its lethal depressurization in which to act on Feb. 1, 2003.

The crew's response was hampered by delays in donning their re-entry pressure suits, which ultimately would not have saved them during the searing plunge into the atmosphere anyway.

The company planning to take tourists into space, Virgin Galactic, and the State of New Mexico announced today that they have signed a 20-year lease agreement - a deal worth an estimated $150 million to $250 million which firmly plants the spaceline operator's world headquarters in New Mexico to make use of Spaceport America.

The inland Spaceport America is billed as the nation's first purposely built commercial spaceport.

Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic firm will make use of the WhiteKnightTwo/SpaceShipTwo launch system - now under development at Scaled Composites in Mojave, California - to loft paying customers at $200,000 a seat on suborbital treks departing from Spaceport America.

All,

Happy New Year!!

The ARISS team hopes you are all enjoying the diverse amateur radio opportunities that have occurred on the ISS over the past several weeks. We want to thank Mike Fincke, KE5AIT, for his outstanding support to the ISS Ham Radio community. His efforts have been phenomenal!

This e-mail provides an update of the ARISS special event opportunities for the next two weeks. As previously mentioned, the ARISS team is currently celebrating 25 years of amateur radio operations from space.

This past week, the ISS Ham radio system was configured in the L/V crossband repeater mode. This configuration will continue through to Saturday when a school contact is scheduled around 10:35 UTC. After the school contact on Saturday January 3, it is our plans to have Mike Fincke reconfigure the radio to support V/U crossband repeater operations. As a reminder, that configuration has a 145.99 MHz uplink frequency including PL tone of 67.0 and a 437.80 MHz downlink frequency. All repeater operations are being performed in low power (5 W) mode. It is our intent to keep the repeater active in this configuration for 2 weeks (through January 17).